Readings & Lectures

A Library of Light: Danielle Vogel, fahima ife, and Stefania Gomez

November 16, 2024 | 8:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Poetry Foundation, 61 West Superior Street, Chicago, IL 60654

Three women poets weave sensual rituals of grief, love, and luminosity. Danielle Vogel reads from her new book A Library of Light, a prose poetry memoir with meditations on cellular light and memory following her mother’s death. fahima ife performs ecstatic sonic rituals of soul retrieval in Septet for the Luminous Ones. Rounding out the line-up is Chicago emerging poet and 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist Stefania Gomez, who composes breathless “redwork” elegies at her loom.

Murmurs from the poets:

We are an ambiance of remains. Wreckage, re-configuring. We are an illuminated architecture. Nothing you know to name. We are a moving letter. Topologies of sound. We are never static, but echoic. As we make shape, we take it. The mouth,

unmarooned.

— Danielle Vogel, from A Library of Light

when is the last time
we let sense warp
the witness

tangle the fields
something mystic

of love and its

limits

— fahima ife, from Septet for the Luminous Ones

Last night, by candle light,
a woman unearthed me.
Together, she and I grieved
the impossibility of disappearing
into one

another.

— Stefania Gomez, from At the New York City AIDS Memorial

This event is part of the Poetry Foundation’s fall 2024 season, Murmuring Americas. All Poetry Foundation events are completely free of charge and open to the public, though advanced registration is encouraged. The performance space is ADA-compliant and wheelchair-accessible, and the program will feature CART captioning and ASL interpretation. For more information about accessibility at the Poetry Foundation, please visit our Accessibility Guide.